Hey, I made a meme, inspired by the troubles besetting Trump’s transition team.
In case you haven’t been following the issue, here are a few just slightly alarming quotes from a Huffington Post piece on the chaos.
Donald Trump’s transition team is nearing a state of stasis, causing concern among both Democrats and Republicans in Washington that his White House will be woefully ill-prepared once he is inaugurated. …
The disarray has left agencies virtually frozen, unable to communicate with the people tasked with replacing them and their staff. Trump transition team officials were a no-show at the Pentagon, the Washington Examiner reported. Same goes for the Department of Energy, responsible for keeping the nation’s nuclear weapons safe, where officials had expected members of the Trump transition team on Monday. Ditto for the Department of Transportation. Over at the Justice Department, officials also are still waiting to hear from the Trump team. …
According to several sources close to the Trump transition team and inside the Obama administration, the president elect and his staff have had difficulty finding able-minded Republicans willing to take on critical posts. One Democratic source, who like others would only discuss sensitive talks on condition of anonymity, said transition officials had been informally asking Obama political appointees to recommend Republicans to take over their jobs.
Yeah, that’s kind of what happens when you elect a dude who has no freaking idea what he’s doing to the highest office in the land.
Well, my socialist ass is so glad that Newthis wants the senate to resurrect HUAC from its well earned cesspit grave. Can’t wait for Beyonce to get hauled in for public questioning.
hottotrotsky you stole the new page from meeeeeehhhhhh
Silliness aside, Thanksgiving is looking more and more grim for me and my ilk (that is, liberal uni students with red extended family).
Terrifyingly, I have no idea what Donald Trump is doing either.
The one positive aspect I see of the faithless electors issue is that, if they take the election away from Trump, the resulting screams of rage from the white nationalist base will make getting rid of the Electoral Collage a lot easier, even though said Collage is one of the things that has given the white nationalists a lever on power.
The problem, as Falconer and others have said, is that said screams of rage are likely to involve a whole lot of people getting hurt in the process. Also, just taking away the presidency is mostly going to result in more years of obstructionism.
And not only did I misspell ‘College’ twice, but because I run with Javascript disabled, I don’t get an edit button. Arg.
John Oliver‘s final show earlier this week. He’s got some really good suggestions in it.
Troubelle, hugs if you want them. You have dignity and worth. YOU MATTER!! Take the next right step each time.
@Jenora
I get the feeling that that will happen no matter what is done. :/
OT, but does anybody have any suggestions for protecting your privacy online in the face of expanding digital surveillance?
I’m ashamed to admit, I went to sleep on the subject of digital spying, given that it seemed like the G-men were being required to have get warrants and the comm companies weren’t just handing the data over.
Also drones, and extrajudicial executions. I let a lot of stuff slide under Obama, and maybe that makes me part of the problem.
@Eddie
Thanks. I know it’s true, but it can be hard to apply it sometimes.
@hottotrotsky
http://poisonparadise.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/formation-4.gif
@Falconer
Pretty straightforward; they were Bernie or Busters who figured that Clinton’s win was safe enough that they could cast protest votes. Now they figure different.
I’ll have to hunt a bit, but I’ve seen a couple good resources on that topic recently.
@falconer : depend vs what you want to protect you. If you’re specifically targeted by actual, competent spies, there’s no way out apart from embracing being a spy too.
If you want to avoid large profiling, the general idea is to lower the amount of breadcrumb you leave behind. Here a bunch of suggestions.
* disable javascripts by default, and put an adblocker. Authorize the javascript of site you trust and/or use a lot, just refuse the one of the random site you look at. Cookie disabling can help too, but I find it much more disruptive.
* use separated email for work, family, and friend. You may fragmentize more if you want. Have each in a different email provider. Note that it’s not hard to see through this if one actually try to find your secrets, but it limit automatic detection.
* avoid SMS and email in favor of calling people. Nobody routinely analyze every vocal message, because it’s much more work than analyzing texts.
* avoid using google connect, facebook connect, twitter connect and the like. Facebook is the most important one, and specifically never going on facebook and blacklisting cookies from facebook is a good idea
* don’t use your phone to go on internet. Mobile visit from sites give a lot of information on who you are, like where you work or who you visit.
A lot of people will also say to use TOR and co, but remember TOR will do jack shit to your privacy if you aren’t super strict with your privacy already, and that’s even a lot harder than my advices.
Thoses advices have been good enough to make targeted ads widely off target on me, which I take as a sign it do protect a bit of privacy. But most importantly, remember to not destroy your own life trying to protect your privacy. You can make tracking you a hassle, but you can’t make it impossible as long as you own a phone.
@Falconer
Using Linux as your operating system is good. I’ve seen networks that didn’t properly recognize Linux.
You can run Tor and even use it as a “live CD” which leaves no fingerprints.
I know there are ways to encrypt your email so that only the receiver can read it.
David Brin posts quite a lot about privacy as an issue, too.
Edit: ninjad by Ohlman. They are right about Tor, you have to be careful with it.
Newt: “Are you now, or have you ever been… blah, blah, blah…?”
Queen Bey: “Get fucked.” (leaves)
@megalibrarygirl : linux and encryption is kind of a higher level privacy stuff. The easiest way by far to track and learn about someone is tracking his internet habit. The trackers for thoses mostly only care about your browser, not your operating system. I love linux and find it easier to use than windows, and more customizable, but the transition period can be harsh.
Also, encrypting everything tend to be a hassle, and to make you a hassle to the people you take to. Isolating oneself because it’s too hard to reach you is counter productive. It’s more what I would advice to a lawyer or a doctor who want his professional files safe.
Then again, maybe Falconer is a bona fide activist, a lawyer, or something like that. In which case I would urge him to ask someone in his field who know about the topic. I am much more specialized in customer tracking. Given the low price of that kind of service, I am pretty sure police use thoses trackers first before asking the big gun of the NSA.
Re the Electoral College: as far as I know, the daydream is that Clinton wins the popular vote (and people stop pretending that Trump isn’t a raging dumpster fire) and therefore a sufficient number of electors decide to vote for Clinton. That would be the ironic democratic-outcome-via-undemocratic-means.
And I’m an ignorant untutored layperson, but I just can’t imagine that outcome being worse for vulnerable people than letting a Trump administration happen—and I, like a lot of people, have been involuntarily imagining all sorts of bad outcomes. At the very least, we’d probably confine the freak-out to our own country.
@ramen : if the outcome is a fascist revolution fueled by resentment over undemocratic process, then it will be worse. Even if it fail.
Even without that, the electoral college is much more likely to elect an establishment republican than Clinton. Which mean a lot of the bad thing of trump presidency will still happen, like yet another super conservative supreme court member and assaults on civil right everywhere, but with fascist backlash over undemocratic stuff nonetheless.
For those who are unaware, if the President of the US leaves office before the end of his/her term, whether by dying, resigning, or being impeached… the Vice President becomes president, and the Speaker of the House (currently Paul Ryan) becomes vice president.
If there’s no Speaker of the House for some reason, then the President Pro Tempore of the Senate (currently Orrin Hatch) becomes VP.
There’s a long line of succession after that – 15 more positions, the heads of various federal departments and members of the president’s cabinet. Just in case the government gets mostly wiped out, apparently.
Exception: If someone who holds the position doesn’t qualify to be US president, then the line skips them and goes to the next position down the list.
The new president serves out the remainder of the term. It doesn’t count towards his/her maximum limit of two terms as president if the remaining time is less than 2 years.
Presumably, even if the entire line of succession were wiped out, the remaining members of the House could elect one of their own as the new Speaker, and the remaining members of the Senate could elect one of their own as the new President Pro Tempore, and then they’d become the next president and vice president (respectively) almost immediately. Then they’d elect new people to those positions again next congressional session.
Pence wouldn’t be any better but if Trump did something impeacheable during his first term and was convicted, it’s likely Pence would not win in 2020 because he’d be tainted by Trump. That’s a huge incentive to win the 2018 mid terms.
Hey, Twitter might be starting to improve. Maybe. Doubtful, but this is better than nothing.
https://www.colorlines.com/articles/twitter-suspends-several-alt-right-accounts
@falconer
You can do it, but it can be surprisingly inconvenient. I think most of the important stuff is covered above, but to repeat (and maybe add new stuff)…
– I’d say don’t use unencrypted email, but good luck getting everyone you want to talk with to sort out encryption. You’ll have more luck getting them to use a secure chat system.
– I’d say don’t use any chat service that doesn’t promise encryption and perfect forward secrecy, but good luck getting everyone you want to talk with to use Yet Another Chat App. Various people claim to support all this (whatsapp, google allo, facebook) but:
– don’t use free web services provided by big companies. this means chat systems, email, social networks, blah blah blah. This probably means paying for your email.
– don’t use facebook or gmail or whatever to sign into anything
– don’t sign up for third party services like disqus or gravatar. This can be quite inconvenient.
– noscript, adblockers (eg. ublock origin), privacy extensions (maybe ghostery but they’re problematic these days, privacy badger) and cookie blocking are a good start. Loads of things will break, but on the upside most of the broken things will be problematic security-wise.
If you actually go through with all of that, tor becomes much less important, but actually doing all the things you probably want to do becomes exceedingly difficult. Good luck!
(edit: is it just me, or does the mammoth html thing not understand lists?)
Thanks, everyone, for your privacy suggestions.
@Snowberry, I think that line of succession is just in case
CapricaDC gets nuked or something, and we have to choose a new president.My folks say, when Gerald Ford ascended to the Big Chair, he got to choose his new VP, and Wikipedia says he nominated Nelson Rockefeller over ol’ Pappy Bush.
I can turn my computer on and off… usually I can log on to the Interwebnet-thingie without TOO much trouble…. I’ve got over-the-counter anti-virus, anti-malware and spyware…. Other’n that, I’m pretty much a victim waiting for a predator…. 🙁
I do have the advantage that if anyone stole my identity, they’d send it back with a sympathy card, tho. 🙂
@Falconer,
Lot’s of tips and resources at ‘Security in a box‘
Also, as we used to say in security culture workshops “Don’t say or write anything on the phone or computer that you wouldn’t want a judge to hear”
DAMMIT @Falconer, you stole my Battlestar Galactica joke!!
CURSES!!
(you actually made a better one that I had prepared. DAMMIT).